Combining both entertainment and business, live commerce is quickly becoming a major sales channel for a wide variety of different companies. Recent partnerships like the Shopify and Whatnot integration have made it easier than ever for companies to add live selling to their sales strategy.
But while this integration simplifies things and addresses many common seller concerns, several other challenges still hold some companies back from truly being able to take advantage of live selling.
Live Commerce is the Future
Live commerce is currently exploding in popularity, as platforms like Whatnot, eBay Live, and others continue to grow. In fact, Whatnot passed $8 billion in live sales last year, and the platform is adding more than half a million new users every week as it expands.
Live selling gives potential buyers a chance to see products in action, ask questions, and make instant purchasing decisions, and often helps brands build stronger buyer relationships. Tom Verrilli, Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, said that these types of interactions not only move inventory faster, but also build trust and increase conversions.
The recent Shopify-Whatnot integration has also simplified the process of selling live for many businesses, as it connects your Shopify store directly to Whatnot and lets you handle everything in one place, as opposed to jumping from platform to platform.
Whatnot also argues that its native Shopify Sales Channel serves as an alternative to larger social commerce platforms and gives individual sellers more control of their customer relationships.
While live selling on Whatnot was traditionally focused on things like collectibles, trading cards, and fashion, it has expanded into other categories, and its growth has also led more traditional retailers to become interested in selling live. Thankfully, the integration helps companies add it without significantly changing their workflows, making it a great complementary sales channel.
Inventory Has Been a Major Operational Challenge
This integration also helps solve one of the biggest challenges that live sellers using Shopify have experienced, which is inventory. In the past, many live sellers would experience difficulty keeping products, inventory, and orders synced across platforms. Trying to manage inventory during the high-velocity flash traffic and sales that live selling brings complicates this further.
In fact, Verrilli said that over 70% of Whatnot sellers who use Shopify cite difficulty keeping things synced across platforms. Thankfully, this integration changed this by letting Shopify handle catalog and inventory management, and then syncing updates in real-time between Shopify and Whatnot when sales happen, with no need to do things manually.
Other Challenges of Selling Live
However, inventory is far from the only challenge associated with live commerce. Being aware of these challenges, and knowing how to overcome them, is crucial for live sellers to find success, whether they’re selling on Whatnot, eBay, or another platform.
Fulfillment Spikes
In many cases, live selling leads to major spikes in orders when you’re live, compared to the relatively spread-out sales of a traditional online storefront. As you could imagine, this many orders all coming in at once puts a major strain on your packaging, fulfilment, and shipping operations.
With rapid deliveries being one of the most important elements of online shopping, the last thing you want to do is upset many customers with shipping delays.
As a result, you need to have a plan in place to prepare for this influx of sales, whether it’s pre-packaging a certain amount of items you think may sell or using automation and technology to speed up label creation and/or packaging as soon as the stream is over.
Technical Issues
There are a wide range of technical issues that can ruin your streams and make it difficult to sell live at all. This includes hardware failures, camera and mic issues, a poor internet connection, and other platform-related outages. Even a few seconds of lag, buffering, audio issues, or freezing can lead to many potential customers leaving your stream.
To overcome these challenges, it’s important to always stream in areas with strong internet and consider testing out all of the hardware, software, and production components before going live to ensure you can fix any details beforehand.
However, even if you take all the proper precautions and use the best and most reliable technology possible, these tech issues may still pop up from time to time.
High Returns
The bread and butter of live ecommerce is impulse buys. Someone sees an item they like, and they often buy it spontaneously without doing as much homework as they might if they were shopping on a static marketplace or storefront.
This, combined with the fact that seeing things like color and fit is often hard on video, may lead to high return rates once the impulse wears off or someone ends up with something that doesn’t look how they thought it did. Similarly, customers may buy multiple sizes and colors to ensure they end up with the right option, and then return the rest.
To help minimize these returns and prevent them from overwhelming your team, make sure to offer product close-ups frequently during the stream, have size guidelines for any clothing, and provide a clear and non-negotiable return policy that details exactly what can and can’t be returned.
Also, while you don’t want the return process to be overly annoying for customers, if you make it completely risk-free and effortless, it may encourage more people to buy items they have no intention of keeping or aren’t sure they actually want.
Our Take
Partaking in the Growth Requires Doing the Work
If you want to be a part of the explosion in live commerce popularity that many expect will come in the future, you need to go about things the right way. Simply going live and showing off your product isn’t always enough to grant you success, especially with how competitive the industry is becoming.
You need to be sure to address the common challenges that exist, be consistent, and promote your live streams, content, and products well. Also, make sure to focus on the entertainment aspect of your streams as much as (or even more than) the selling.
